Consider a situation where a potential customer is faced with selecting the most appropriate product or service from a selection that is great in number.
It can appear to the customer that the products or services are quite similar and their differences are not that apparent, and further, the decision-making process is complicated by the extent of the selection. A customer may typically lack the confidence that any particular product or service is a good match with their needs, and in consequence such a customer will often not reach a decision to purchase even though very suitable products are offered.
There is therefore a need for a decision aid that assists a customer in purchasing decisions. Such a decision can produce a short list of products or services which are a good match with the customer's needs together with justification or explanation relating to the selection in the short list. Such a short list can allow the customer to make the easier final choice from say twenty products or services that appear to the user only to be generally suitable.
‘Decision Guide’—a software package that allows users to slide sliders one at a time in order to state how important various features of a holiday are is known in the art. This package treats features uniformly in identifying holidays which match the set of criteria that are important to the user.
Rackham's book on ‘Making Major Sales’ lays out the theory that consumers' behaviour can be modelled by:                identifying a set of criteria that the consumer considers important in evaluating a product or service;        ranking the importance of these selection criteria to the customer;        identifying leading ‘best match’ products and services according to a principle based on the match with criteria ranked highly by the consumer in preference to the match with those criteria ranked lowly by the consumer.        
However, Rackham does not indicate a mechanism for implementing his theory.
Present systems do not allow decision makers to non-linearly weight their decision criteria in order to arrive at an optimum ranking of products/services.
One accepted account of an overall purchase-decision-making process for a person engaged in the activity of selecting a product or service (hereafter, for simplicity, referred to simply as a product) suggests that there are three individual decision-making steps. The first step concerns the person recognising the need for a product leading to a decision that the person ‘wants one of these products’. The second step concerns the person evaluating the options leading to a decision that the person ‘wants a particular product’. The third step concerns the person overcoming doubts that may arise leading to a decision to proceed with and conclude the selection/purchase activity.
The limitations of many current techniques of aiding a decision maker are evident when they are compared with this three-step account of the decision-making processes.
For example, many electronic commerce web sites make good use of graphics and multimedia to engage the user in the desirability of having one of the products being offered, thus helping the user through the first decision-making step. Also, many web sites provide reassurance about the final selection/purchase activity such as the security of financial transactions, the return of products, support and warranty, thus helping the user through the third decision-making step. Such web sites thus adequately aid a user with the first and third steps, but do not provide aid for the second step.
Many web sites simply present information, and sometimes a considerable amount of information, describing each available product. This is done, presumably, with the expectation that a simple presentation of information about the products on offer will form a sufficient basis for the user to be able to evaluate the options and thus carry through the second step of the decision process. In practice this is not an effective technique and users of such web-sites often do not choose an option (i.e. stay at the first step of the decision-making process) or spontaneously make an ill-informed decision (i.e. miss out the second step of the decision-making process altogether because of information overload).
This conclusion is reached by considering a typical situation in electronic commerce. A good retailer is generally considered to be one that offers a wide choice to the consumer. The choice offered in a conventional (non-electronic-based) retail environment often comprises a wide range of between ten and thirty or more similar products. A typical retail environment (i.e. a shop) is designed to make the decision process engaging and interesting so that consumers obtain satisfaction from the decision and selection process. However, when using a typical electronic interaction device, such as a personal computer connected to the Internet, it is very difficult (and often uninteresting) for a user to make a selection by browsing detailed large amounts of information about a lengthy succession of individual similar products.
It is generally possible for a user to make a detailed assessment of selection options from only a very limited range, perhaps as few as three similar products when using such an interaction device. The user's selection process is significantly impaired if there are more than about five similar products, if no assistance is provided for comparing information about the products. This is because it is generally difficult to compare information and so the comparison process becomes a repetitive mental chore that quickly leads to boredom, which in turn leads to distraction thus making it easy for the consumer not to complete the decision-making activity.
The second decision-making step is thus a weak link in the chain of decision-making processes. However, attempts have been made to provide assistance with this decision-making process.
A first example of such an attempt to provide decision-making assistance concerns the presentation of a summary display comprising a synopsis of the many products that are available. A user can select one of these products and request more detailed information regarding that product—held on a separate web page on a remote server. After examining that information the user returns to the summary page and considers an alternative product. This technique is referred to colloquially as a ‘pogo-stick’ since it involves the user jumping up and down between a sequence of web pages. It is difficult for the user to compare products because detailed information is shown about only one product at one time and navigation through the information is inhibited by the delays that occur when accessing information from a remote server.
A second example of such an attempt to provide decision-making assistance provides a user with a form with several fields or pull-down menus that are used by the user to convey preference information. The content of such a form is transmitted via the Internet and processed by a remote server. Recommendation logic executes on the remote server and recommendations are then transmitted back to the user. The delay between submitting a completed form and receiving recommendations can often amount to many seconds which is significantly greater than a human user's typical sub-second response time. Such delays induce boredom and allow the user to become distracted. Users might thus typically engage in only two or three alternative queries before being frustrated by the slow response and thus not conclude the decision-making process.
A third example of such an attempt to provide decision-making assistance concerns the improved use of sliders to indicate user preference information instead of making entries in fields in a form or by using pull-down menus. In this example the preference information is transmitted to recommendation logic executing on a remote server, as in the second example thus still leading to a slow response, and the user thus being unwilling to engage in exploring many alternatives.